Nearly two decades ago, subpar DNA evidence helped send Robert Dewey to prison for life for the rape and strangling death of a young woman in her Palisade apartment.

At a Monday court hearing in Mesa County, a new analysis of the DNA found at the crime scene is expected to set him free.

It would mark a rare instance where a murder case was thrown out post-conviction, the most recent being Timothy Masters’ in 2008.

Attorneys involved in Dewey’s case were reluctant to discuss details before the court hearing but confirmed that it has been investigated by the attorney general’s office team that reviews old convictions.

“We were approached by the defense attorney in this case. It’s one that we forwarded to our Justice Review Project for DNA testing,” said AG spokesman Mike Saccone. “We look to see whether someone is wrongfully incarcerated.”

Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger, whose office prosecuted Dewey, did not return a call for comment Friday.

Defense attorney Danyel Joffe also declined to comment on the details of Dewey’s post-conviction motion until Monday. She was appointed by the court to represent Dewey in 2001.

“After investigating his case, I came to believe he was innocent,” Joffe said.

Nineteen-year-old Jacie Taylor was discovered in June 1994 half-naked in her Palisade apartment’s bathtub. She’d been raped and strangled with a nylon dog leash.

The circumstantial evidence didn’t look good for Dewey.

Both Taylor and Dewey — a motorcycle buff nicknamed “Rider” — ran with a crowd involved in the area’s burgeoning meth culture. Dewey had been staying with family of Taylor’s roommate, Cynthia Mallow.

Dewey had priors for armed robbery and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon. And authorities who picked him up in Pueblo shortly after the murder said he was on his way out of the state.

Still, the evidence never quite stacked up, according to one of Dewey’s original defense attorneys, Steve Laiche. He called it “one of the freakiest-deakiest cases I’ve ever done.”

Laiche recalled that witnesses had to be jailed so they could be forced to testify. New evidence kept appearing during the trial, such as a handprint on Taylor’s shower. Evidence was contaminated. The Palisade Police Department made mistakes, he said.

“This trial went up and down and every which way,” Laiche said. “If we had tried that case today, it would have been a different trial. He would have walked.”

Throughout, Dewey maintained his innocence. He sat, arms crossed, in 1996 as jurors returned their guilty verdict. Post-conviction, he continued appealing his case and asking the court to order re-testing of the prosecution’s DNA evidence, to no avail.

Police found semen on a blanket Taylor had used just before her death, and they found blood on Dewey’s workshirt.

Tests showed the semen was not Dewey’s, leading authorities to change their theory of the case to include an accomplice.

“There were several people in her apartment that night, so other people may have been involved in something or at least had knowledge of it and covered it up,” Palisade Police Chief C.L. Quarles said in 1995.

No other arrests were ever made.

A private lab in Texas, Gene Screen Inc., tested the blood on Dewey’s shirt, and officials testified at trial that it might have come from Taylor.

It also could have come from 45 percent of the Caucasian population, said Moses Schanfield, who headed up a Denver genetic-testing lab at the time and testified at Dewey’s trial that the Texas tests were faulty.

“It shouldn’t have ever been admitted in court. It was pretty bad procedure,” said Schanfield, now a George Washington University forensic-science professor.

The prominence of DNA in the case made it a strong candidate for the AG’s Justice Review Project, launched in 2010 with a federal grant.

Investigators pored through 5,000 convictions looking for cases like Dewey’s, where those convicted of rape, murder or manslaughter maintained their innocence and DNA was available. Only Dewey’s was advanced for additional testing of evidence.

Attorney Ann England runs the Colorado Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Law School, which was not involved in Dewey’s case.

She said it’s extremely difficult to get authorities to pay attention to convicts, let alone retest evidence or re-examine the facts of cases. She doesn’t see many exonerations in Colorado.

“Part of why it’s so difficult is because there is a conviction. There was some kind of evidence. And you’re talking about a fairly narrow slice of crime” where DNA could exonerate an inmate, she said. “It’s incredibly rare.”

The owners of Boulder’s Sterling University Peaks apartments, who this summer were cited for illegally subdividing 92 bedrooms in the complex, have reached an agreement to settle the case for $410,000, the city announced Thursday.